Speaker
Tingyu Li
(Tsinghua)
Description
Inspired by string theory and cosmological constant problem, it is plausible that the Universe’s vacuum structure is characterized by a landscape of metastable vacua. If the dark vacuum is metastable, bubbles of lower-energy phases can nucleate at an approximately constant rate. Because the Hubble expansion rate is monotonically non-increasing with cosmic time, such nucleation can eventually lead to percolation and completion of a dark-sector phase transition. In this work, we investigate the phenomenological consequences of this transition, focusing on the resulting stochastic gravitational-wave background and the potential formation of primordial black holes.
